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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

'Lessons' by Denise Oehmcke

I am
watching my brother hold the face of his seventeen year old black lab while the
vet injects his animal with an algae green liquid that will take Rocco away and
leave Brian completely alone. After we stay in this cold room too long and snot
through too many Kleenex, we walk back to my car and sit. We sit and he cries
so hard and so desperately that it seems almost physically dangerous.

Dogs
are put to sleep all the time. People lose dogs. Dogs don’t live long, they
die...all the time. This I know, we both know, but all those sleeping dogs are
not Rocco and their masters aren’t my forty-six year old brother Brian. I close
my eyes and let my head fall against the seat rest; he slowly says my name and
I nod as he does because I know what he will say next.

At
the beginning of this same sunny August day, Brian pulls his white
ladder-topped work van into my driveway and is out and at the back door fast.
He calls in and asks me to come outside.
I find him pacing the garage, taking his backward-facing filthy baseball
cap off and putting it on, taking and putting. His eyes are crazed...guilty and
angry and scared and mean and more angry and brilliantly blue. I act bored....and I am acting.

“I
think I might be going to jail today...so, I’m going to put a fucking bullet in
my head instead....I just want you to know that that is exactly what I am
fucking going to do today - now - I swear, I’m done.”

Ten
minutes earlier I am rinsing ketchup from lunch plates asking my sweaty
thirteen year old son to get off of his I-Thing and in the shower...for the
third time. In fifteen minutes I am suppose to be driving my clean compliant
son to an appointment where I will sit in an orderly waiting room and read
People Magazine while the orthodontist reapplies the braces which keep pinging
off my Starburst eating son’s teeth. No
jail, no bullets, no crazy....just a quick fix from the teeth guy.

I
ask him what happened and why he’s thinks he’s going to jail which sets off his
ramped-up version of what someone else f-ing did to him....again, it’s somebody
else’s fault.

When
they notice his truck in the driveway, both my kids come cranking out the back
door. JJ I’m sure for a smack-talking
game of HORSE and Anna just to be tossed around and told how beautiful and
funny and wacky she is because on a good day, that’s what happens when Uncle
Brian stops over. He’s the brightest and funniest of all their visitors...the
one who plays tickle monster and doesn’t stop after a short time like most
adults would....who teases and wrestles and won’t ever leave without saying
something like, “Well guys, ever since
she was a little girl your mom just haaas to have a goodbye kiss from me and, I
don’t want to make her mad so pucker up Sis”...the one who above all else will
not disappoint them.

Now,
this day, even though I half smile at them as they approach, because again...I
am acting, they know. Today, Brian can’t hide the shitty madness that races
around in his eyes and so, they sidestep their greeting and go back in the
house. Anna actually skips back humming because now, she is acting too - she
doesn’t want Uncle Brian to see that she knows he might be a bad dude.

I
was a sophmore in highschool and imitating my way toward being very cool when
he was an extremely fresh freshman with a bowl-haircut and highwater
pants...the underdog, the down-trodden, timid and sad. Four years later, by the time he doesn’t
graduate high school, he is Judd Nelson’s John Bender of The Breakfast Club.

And
then, I am off at college, he is just off being gone. Missing to an apartment
with a group of guys none of us know. I
go to pick him up the morning of my grandfather’s funeral. The house is exactly
what it could only be - weeds instead of a lawn, blankets instead of drapes,
front door hanging open instead of locked, smells of liquor instead of a
breakfast, bodies sleeping on couches and floors instead of in beds. I call out
his name and some body points to a back bedroom. When Brian notices me he rocks himself to his
feet laughing and says, “Holy crap Neen, what are you doing here?” He has 8 additional inches of hair and a
black bandana skull-cap tied around his head just above his caribbean blue
eyes. He keeps laughing a Heath-Ledger-as-the-Joker laugh. He puts on someone else’s clothes and follows
me to my car. I cry all the way to the funeral begging him to move out of this
house, to get a job and to fix his life. He chain smokes and tells me that it’s
not f-ing worth it.

That
chunk of years I lend him money and my car, sit with him at court dates, fight
a knife away from his girlfriend, clean his house weekly, write letters on his
behalf to landlords, probation officers and employers. I aid and abet. I am my
brother’s keeper.

July
of 1997 he stands up in my wedding looking like Ben Affleck and drawing a
circle of relatives and single girls to him. Hopeful people who know of his
“struggles” are practically chanting their blessings on him, everyone giddy to
see him so clean and so haircutted. He does this often, does a Superman on us
from Kid Rock to The Bachelor (pick any season.) And then here come the hopeful...praising him
for he has changed; I am always one of them. I am never not one of them.

I
work hard for a very long time to help and fix, hoping that he will finally
learn a ‘lesson’ but I learn that for him, lessons are for children and as a
child he learned plenty. He learned that a father doesn’t necessarily stop
drinking and stay and that a stepfather can set you to stand bare-footed in the
nighttime snow and drop-kick you off the porch if you try to scramble your
little 5 year-old self to warmth and that whole patches of your hair do come
out if pulled hard enough and that the inside of a tiny broom closet gets crazy
scary after hours in the unbending blackness.
He got it....love is conditional,
honesty brutal, anger dangerous, embarrassment painful, home a fallacy.
And now he’s in my garage with his explosive head in his hands telling me once
again how he hates his f-ing life...how this is the end and how he wants out.

And
so I tell him that I will help him in only one way. I will take him now and
drive him to a treatment hospital.

One
year before I got married, Brian bought a puppy. Rocco has been at his knee
since--with him on every job site, rooted near the foot of his ladder, glancing
up and down and following back and forth to the supply pile....always always
with his loyal eyes on Brian while he strips and replaces the siding off of
hundreds of houses. Their partnership is unconditional, safe, comforting and
real. Their partnership is the reason Brian tells me today that he cannot check
himself in. But, Rocco is ancient-old in dog-years and I know that Brian has to
carry him in and out of the house so that he can go to the bathroom and that he
lies on a blanket waiting for Brian to come home and that this is all he does
these days.

And
today I am hitting this panicky desperate man head on. I tell him that we will
go now and get Rocco and take him to be put to sleep and that then I will drive
him to a place, a program...the only solution. He cracks like a little boy and
chokes out the first honest words he has spoken today, “I can’t, I don’t want
to be alone...” He sobs scary-like and the floor of my stomach pitches and
rocks and now I am really really acting when I calmly say, “Alone or dead. You choose.”

I
walk into my house, put my head in my hands and I wait.

“Let’s
go get Rocco” he says to me through the kitchen window.

And
now, we have done it. I drove him home, he scooped up Rocco, his tail wagging
in the scaffold of Brian’s arms - they laid together in the back of my car on
the way to the Humane Society. I drove directly there. He held his loyal face,
and felt him die and now we are back in my car and Brian is slowly saying my name and I am
nodding because, I know.

“Denise,
I can’t go today....I need a week to get my shit in order....I’m in the middle
of a job and I need this builder...I’ll lose my business. I just need a week; I’ll start fresh next
week.” I am nodding as I creep out of
the Humane Society parking lot to drive back to my home, to my kids
where I’ll push this damage down deep where it was before he showed up this
morning.

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